Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

It's not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don't go there, it's a trap. I'd tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

With that one little booklet put back in place, it came as a different story. Because of that burrow through rock and water—lacuna, he called it. This time I read with a different heart, understanding the hero would still be standing at journey's end. Or at least, live or die, he'd known of a chance and aimed to take it.

little white top, white hip-hugger jeans, some prime real estate in between. I got a rush to recall touching that belly under the blankets. You don't forget your first, even if we're only talking the minor bases. She was in the big leagues now, laughing, padding around in Chinese-looking flip-flops, giving out cake squares on napkins. I wondered

It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

Most families would sooner forgive you for going to prison than for moving out of

On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.

Willa's lifelong service to the duty of proper order now seemed like an idiot's game.

Emelina set a cup of tea in front of me. I picked it up and let the steam touch my eyelids, realizing that what I needed most at that moment was to lie in bed with someone who was fond of every inch of my skin.

When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." "If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have

Tig widened her eyes at Willa, suggesting she might be overdoing it.

You have to understand the rhyme and reasons of Dori. Why she was radical and fun like a little girl, even after all her friends left her flat. How she stayed patient with a wheezing, crying man gone old before his time. Why her foot kept bouncing. Her sparkly eyes were not really black, but blue. Bending down to kiss her, I'd see the thinnest crescent of sky blue around the huge black center. Living a life like hers, most people would have lost it a thousand times over.

We could see early on that all grown-ups aren't equally immune to damage. My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldiers, while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don't rule it out.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person's reckless mistake. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something.

We'd worked so hard for God's favor, yet it seemed God was still waiting for some extra labor on our part, and it was up to my father to figure out what.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

But you could run out of gas on boyish, that was the thing. A message that should be engraved in every woman's wedding band.

If God speaks for the man who keeps quiet, then Violet Brown may be His instrument.

Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid.

I wasn't keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always looking ahead for the perfect home, where trains never wrecked and hearts never broke, where no one you loved ever died.

No, you shouldn't have come here. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world then yes and no.